So how do you juggle the demands of being a parent with the demands of your job? People who can afford private nannies and people in New York State
spend a lot of money on childcare. That's just the average. There is a nursery at UCLA where my
developmental psychology professor sent her child--for $17,000 a year, but she said, "You're smiling when you sign the check, because you know your
child is going to be well-looked after." More and more people are willing to spend a
reasonable amount of money to have their children well looked after.
But what a "reasonable amount" is actually very high. So high that some women quit their “hard-core corporate life” jobs to take care of and educate their kids themselves. Some women choose to be the child-carer because they were making less money than their husbands anyway (such as in social services). Even women with a “hard-core corporate life” do so though, possibly because childcare, not earning money, is women's work.

Of course, if you're going into a job such as education, the idea
is that you'll automatically have more time to take care of kids
(whether or not this is true is up to debate), which may be one of the
reasons women go into these fields in the first place.

Education has always had a low status in the United States. It
was traditionally performed by recent (male) college graduates, before they
could move into more profitable, higher-status jobs. As more and more
children started getting educated, more and more women
entered the field. Sometimes there were not even high school graduates.
Many were required to be unmarried. In this way, education was not only
feminized, but treated as a young person's temporary job.

To a large extent, this has not changed. Educators are mostly women, and educators stay in the field for an average of 11 years. Women
are also paid less than men. Primary school teachers (and as a previous
TA for elementary school students, I say that their job is not any
easier. Think you know long division? Try explaining it to a 7 year
old), make less than secondary school teachers. Teacher make less than administrators, who are mostly men.

I think our society needs to reevaluate its values. Larry
Summer basically got ousted as president of Harvard because he claimed
that women didn't put in as much work in the STEM fields. But women do just as much work as men, if not more. Maybe instead of women leaning in at work, men should lean in at home. It's not just about work-life
balance. Rearing children, taking care of your home, educating
children, taking care of the sick, the poor, the abused--this iswork. Noble work. We need to start valuing it as such.